Brit Paper: Public Wi-Fi Still Allowing Porn

UNITED KINGDOM—The Daily Mirror has reported that following an investigation into public WiFi hotspots around the country, it found that, lo and behold, "Children can still access hardcore pornography through a quarter of free public Wifi networks." Presumably, adults can as well, but that's not the primary concern.  In April, Prime Minister David Cameron announced that he has struck a deal with ISPs operating approximately 90 percent of the nation's public hotspots to block adult content. He said at the time, "We are promoting good, clean Wifi in local cafes and elsewhere to make sure that people have confidence in public Wifi systems so that they are not going to see things they shouldn’t.” The Mirror decided to see what progress had been made, and after testing 129 free Wifi hotspots around the country, discovered that 32 of them did not block access to pornhub.com, "a streaming website where thousands of hardcore pornographic videos can be viewed for free," according to Nick Sommerlad, who added, "Places where children could access the site through free Wifi included Waterstones bookshops in Birmingham and Southampton, The Cardiff Story museum, the play area at the At-Bristol Science Centre, the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, Coffee Republic and Esquires Coffee House in Doncaster and the Odeon cinema at the Liverpool One shopping centre." The paper then contacted several of the outlets to get their reaction. Most expressed shock and dismay that porn was accessible on the free WiFi. "Thank you for bringing this to our attention – we take this very seriously indeed," said a spokesperson for the At-Bristol Science Centre. "Pending an internal security audit, we have turned off the WiFi network which can be accessed from public spaces, and we will be putting additional measures in place to ensure that this complies with the rest of our security policies." The operator of Cafe Pure at Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital told the paper, “I am very grateful to you for bringing this to our attention, I had no idea our IT provider had failed to install the necessary controls.” The owner of Nathan’s cafe at Bognor Regis railway station responded, “I will be turning off the Wifi immediately and will phone BT to ask what they can do to block this type of website.” However, a Marriott spokeswoman had an altogether different response when queried on its network, telling the Mirror, “Currently we do not filter online content as we rely on our guests to use the service appropriately.” This is not the first investigation into the efficacy of the plan to make public WiFi porn free. As AVN reported in September, an investigation undertaken by The Telegraph found that "one in three UK cafes and restaurants had no content protection in place on their free WiFi networks."